Interesting read about Solid State Drives (SSDs)

I've been contemplating getting an SSD to boost my workstation given all the graphic-intensive work that I do. When you research magnetic hard drive (standard hard drives), you would typically look for the Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF), which gives you an idea of how long you might expect the drive to last.  With SSDs, it's not so simple, because every one uses different parameters of measurement.  Intel uses the standard MTBF, while most others will use writes per block.

In a happy accident while researching Western Digital's newest media player (WD Live TV Plus) I noticed they had a section on their SSDs, which I clicked through.  More importantly, they had a bunch of white papers, one of which caught my eye: "NAND Evolution and its Effects on Solid State Drive (SSD) Useable Life".

Briefly, the physical architecture of each cell of memory in an SSD means that as you keep writing and erasing data stored in that cell, the physical properties of it will break down.  This limitation is described as maximum cycles read/write per cells.  Because of this limitation, SSDs now have leveling technology where, instead of writing sequentially, they will in fact spread out writes across the entire SSD.

Now, if you read that article, it goes into depth about proposed measurements and descriptions of usable life of an SSD.  But here's the bottom line: If you plan to utilize 80GB of data storage (temporary cache and programs), you DO NOT want to buy an 80GB SSD, as it will cut down on the longevity and speed of your SSD severely, and render the leveling technology relatively moot.  What you want to do, is buy an SSD at least twice as large as the space that you plan to ultimately use.

I think I need to repeat that twice: Buy an SSD that is TWICE as large as you plan to use it for.

Now, here's another piece of info: SSDs are increasing in capacity and lowering costs much faster than Moore's theoretical law of transistors on a CPU, which means that by next year, we will see terabyte SSDs, and those 256GB SSDs will be closer to $1/GB than the current $2~$3/GB.  At the same time however, we also know that standard magnetic hard drives continue to drop in price and increase in capacity, at nearly the same rate as Moore's Law.  This time next year, I can easily see many OEMs including a 256GB SSD with a secondary storage drive of 1TB or more.

Of course, I'm no closer to a decision on buying an SSD than before I read that white paper...but at least I have a better grasp on SSDs.